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All conference attendees are invited to a special General Session Friday afternoon. The session will conclude with the Keynote address, presented by Lucien Vattel. Get there early, as space is limited.

As an education trailblazer and game development visionary, Vattel is at the forefront of a nationwide crusade to revolutionize learning in the classroom and beyond. Vattel is the CEO of GameDesk, the Los Angeles-based interactive curriculum creator and digital publisher, which is transforming the traditional school model into a hands-on, digitally-charged ecosystem for students to discover and nourish their greatest gifts all while embracing STEM skills through game-based learning. Building on this methodology, Vattel founded and is Co-Director of PlayMaker, a next-generation, choose-your-own adventure middle school program designed to help teachers and students transcend the confines of textbooks and chalkboards. After securing the largest contribution in AT&T history, Vattel currently leads the design and development of a Los Angeles-based digital learning center and fully comprehensive online portal for educators.

During the last 15 years, Vattel has taught courses in both digital game development history and advanced game design and is also a frequent speaker having recently spoken at TEDx, Games for Change, and SXSW.

We Learn Best When We Experience, Interact and Connect

Transforming learning requires a mind-shift -- a shift in how we learn, how we design learning, and how we facilitate it. Lucien Vattel's keynote will deconstruct a variety of interactive experiential approaches and their links to specific areas of cognition and learning. Vattel proposes that schools have the opportunity to act as interactive hubs, where information and ideas should be interacted with, shared, and re-imagined. Every interactive moment in life is a potential lesson and an opportunity to become more. Vattel's talk will assert the claim that direct interactive experience is the deepest and most profound vehicle for learning. Explorations of low-tech classroom role-play and game-driven learning mechanics, full-body floor-projected environments, open simulation sandboxing, systems learning, and socio-emotional interactions will be explored. The talk will also address school space design, teaching culture, and how new forms of PD can effectively engage teachers in interactive mobile/digital learning, so that they may enrich their practice.

*There is an overflow room for the keynote. The overflow rooms are A205 & A216 in the Administration Building.